The highs and lows of life
The halos of life are its high and low moments. Well, frankly this is just something I came up with because they kinda rhyme with each other. Halos. Highs lows. There was no deliberate attempt at a philosophical implication here. It was just accidental. There are actually much more things that happen by accident in our life. Discovery and exploration, for example, are meant to be accidental, not by design.
I’ve been to this small city called Beppu in the southern part of Japan for one month now, and I have to admit there are not much to do here. Days pass by in a pretty placid way. But since living here, I discovered that the daily life has much more joys to offer than I imagined. At 6:30 every morning, the sounds of birds chirping and wind gently breezing through the leaves are the few things that drop into my ear canals and remind me a new day has officially started. They simulate the liveliness of the metropolises I once lived in, just in a way that’s less noisy and chaotic because now instead of cars honking and humans chatting, I hear some dogs barking from afar. Sometimes during the day, when sitting in my room with the windows open wide, I could hear the Kyushu train passing by and smell the ripeness of persimmons blooming on the leafless trees nearby. The scent of fresh laundry from the neighbour’s house. The rings of bicycle bells when school time’s ended. It is already the end of October and Autumn has gently arrived here with its vibrant orange on the maple leaves and the fading yellowish hidden in the scattered sunshine. Since coming to this city, I’ve stopped using noise-cancelling headphones as a way of concentrating on my work. I simply study and work from 6:30 am until 5:30 in the noon, with hot coffee aside and some water to keep me hydrated. There is a minimum amount of distraction and stimulation here compared to any place I once lived. Things are too calm and somehow too lifeless to feel real in my perspective. Perhaps the surrealness does not come from any externalities but the astonishment at a completely new way of life that I am able to execute. A simple life with many low notes, and yet somehow still strangely fulfilling.
As humans, we aspire to a life full of high notes. Big achievements, unprecedented journeys, extreme emotions, incredible conquers, etc. The low moments, therefore, turn out to be negligible details. We take them for granted then complain that life is exhausting. However, according to a Japanese philosophy called “wabi sabi”, a great source of joy and satisfaction in life comes exactly from those trivial moments (Beth Kempton, 2021). It can be said that deep down, many of us desire to live through that kind of simple joys, which may be why daily life or countryside vlogs flourish on social media and the aesthetics of doing simple activities like visiting coffee shops or listening to music are all over Pinterest. On the other hand, it may be because we think we cannot live a life like that that we seek to live them through others and via our laptops’ screens. However, it can be argued that the ability to find and enjoy the low notes of life is critical. The reason doesn’t have to be complicated: we do not have enough time and energy to generate high-notes moments constantly. If we attempt to do that, chronic stress and burnout are inevitable. Sometimes, we also force ourselves to believe that in the absence of the high notes, low-notes moments can act as a compatible replacement which produces similar emotional effects. The problem with this mental method is that the two things we are trying to equate serve very different purposes. For instance, low notes recover and recharge energy while high notes consume a significant amount of it. They are complementary but still, mutually exclusive.
So, given that (1) there are much more low notes than high notes, (2) low notes are available while high notes are produced, and (3) low notes are as important to achieving a fulfilling life as high notes, we can make a tentative conclusion that: It is necessary to be able to experience and find meanings from the low notes of life as well. In simple words, we should appreciate what’s already there in our life instead of chasing what is not there all the time. I am not old enough to say this, but perhaps I can quote someone else that I look up to:
“If you cannot see the value of the small things, it is hard to see the true value of the big great things. Every single thing you have or do not have in life, you have them for a reason.”
BY LYNN NG.
References:
Beth Kempton (2021) Wabi Sabi: Japanese wisdom for a perfectly imperfect life - Beth Kempton. https://bethkempton.com/wabisabi/.